Even
though we were in a hotel we both slept poorly again, the beds were OK but the
pillows were unbelievably lumpy, it was like sleeping on a sack of potatoes.
We got up around 09:30 and jumped on a tram to the Heineken brewery, when we
arrived it turned out that tours are self-guided so we went round the corner
to a café to eat breakfast.
When I visited the brewery before (a couple of years previously) the tours had been guided, it seemed that there had been quite a few changes to the content as well. The best bits of the tour were the water resources video, the interactive quiz, the free beer, the free gift and the bottle simulator, you’ll have to go there to find out what it is! After the brewery we wandered over to the Rijksmuseum but it was busy and costs quite a bit to get in so we decided not to bother, I think that art galleries should be free of charge – I guess it’s something I’m used to from going into London regularly. Just around the corner from the Rijksmuseum we ate lunch in a small café, they had a display with loads of free postcard-adverts so we took a bunch as souvenirs. After lunch we walked around for a while, we couldn’t quite work out where the trams would stop as there were roadworks where the stops should have been, as it started to rain we found one and went back to the hotel.
The rain was pretty heavy and showed little sign of stopping so we went out to see the Rembrandt House, managing to find another music shop along the way where we both bought CDs. By the time we got down to the right area we’d gone off the idea of the Rembrandt house and instead bought tickets for the next showing of the Holland Experience – a 3D movie. We had 45 minutes to kill before the next show so we went for a beer in a tiny little pub by the canal and withdrew some money from a cash machine. The show was quite amusing, a pretty regular tourist affair but entertaining and the 3D effects were pretty good, this would be a great place for a family with kids.
We walked back to town in the (now much heavier) rain, stopping once again in the music shop to buy even more CDs. The rain eventually calmed down and we wandered around town buying souvenirs and gifts, Barrie bought himself a big glass bong and we bought other smoking paraphernalia for friends. We rearranged the souvenirs and repacked our bags ready for the trip home, it felt weird thinking that in 24 hours time we’d be back home – travelling had almost become a way of life. We went for a last wander around town and ate in a Tibetan restaurant, the food was marvellous, I had never eaten in a Tibetan restaurant before – yet another first-time experience. We took a good wander around the red light district and saw plenty of scantily clad women in the windows – young, old, fat, thin, black, white, Asian – a world of choice. The Japanese tourists seemed especially taken by the whole idea of prostitutes in windows, we saw one guy bartering with a girl over how much it would cost him for whatever he was after.
As
I said before – I’m all for a liberal society and the way things
are in Amsterdam is much better than having pimps who beat-up and rape girls,
taking their money and forcing them to keep selling themselves, these guys at
least have unions. The one thought which bothered me really is that selling
your body for sex is still a grim occupation at best, I wonder if more girls
go into prostitution because it is legal and probably pays more than something
like waitressing or working in McDonalds. Like my views on smoking cannabis
– I think it’s good that it’s legal but I’m not interested
in doing it myself. I think the whole idea of buying sex is horrible but it’s
been happening for thousands of years and it’ll carry on happening, I
guess that legalisation just makes it safer.
At the end of the night
we ended-up in the Grasshopper, another coffee shop. Barrie still had plenty
of weed left from the night before and wanted to make a significant dent in
it before the end of the night. As a non-smoker the Grasshopper was great for
me as it was pretty well air-conditioned and it sold Mountain Dew, the premier
choice of the caffeine-rich sugary drink addict. Once Barrie had smoked his
fill he gave his remaining bag of weed to a bunch of guys on the table next
to us and we headed back to the hotel. I finished reading my book (A Beautiful
Mind by Sylvia Nasar) and tried to get to sleep. This was probably the worst
night’s sleep we got during the whole holiday, the lumpy pillows and the
noise from Friday-night Amsterdam didn’t help but the biggest problem
was the weather. At one point it was absolutely bucketing it down, there was
a hell of a storm out there with massive amounts of thunder and lightning –
a wonderful sight but impossible to sleep through.
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